This week's issue of KC KDE is devoted to the exciting events surrounding the start of KDE3 development and the Qt3 porting efforts. Topics include new applications such as Cookbook, KTouch and Kompare; large file support; S/MIME, EMail templates and KNode/KMail integration; advanced web shortcuts; KMenu plugins; new KDE email lists and websites; KRegExpEditor; KWinTV and more...

Comments

This is done in KDE_2_2_BRANCH which will become 2.2.1. Hunting annoyances in HEAD is mostly pointless as some code will be entitrely replaced in some places. A dedicated bug hunt should start in pre-beta and beta states here.

On the other hand, if you the user just sit there complaining about "some bugs" and then don't actually take the time to make high-quality bug reports, you really can't expect those "some bugs" to be fixed. Eh.

ah, you do know about libsmbclient and the read/write ioslave right? caldera people working on samba are the ones writing that library and also the ioslave. however, they couldn't get it ready in time for KDE2.2. when libsmbclient is finished (which is part of the samba project, not KDE) then konqi can the kind of samba support one would hope for in a GUI filemanager.

This again shows not only the benefits of the open source development model, but also the great willingness of the KDE developers to cooperate and merge, even when, from an outdated, different perspective one could have said that one side "loses". They are not only great programmers, but also great characters.

I only hope the refacturing/rewrite will be fast, and without big troubles, and afterwards the same amount of work will benefit at least both programs - this is great!

One little question: I am often amazed by the font & font size choices kmail makes. Sometimes the font is unreadale small, once it was I think 25pt, and sometimes the font is simply ugly. And text bodies from the far east ( guessed from the sender adress ) sometimes dont show up at all. What is the decision making process behind this?

Do you also sometimes have similar problems with web pages? Then you need to install proper fonts, e.g. a good unicode font. I suggest you search the mailing list archive at http://lists.kde.org, the detailled solution should be listed there (it's a khtml issue).

I had to use :
/path/the_script.sh %1
in the above example (Kmail 1.3.1). Reading KMails manual I would expect %0 is correct, but that wasn't the case.
Drawback of the method above: The calendar entry is copied into korganizer without any feedback to the kmail user.

i agree completely.. there have been discussions going on for the past couple months on the kmail list regarding refactoring the codebase and integrating with knode, etc... i was just _itching_ to cover it in the KC, but i try and stick to a "no vapour ware" policy and don't want to put presure on the developers while they are still kicking ideas around by announcing what they might end up doing in an issue.. so now that they have actually begun the work and bits of the code are showing up, i was very happy to be able to cover it. the kmail/knode developers work very hard on some very non-flashy but extremely important core pieces of software (text msging isn't exactly a buzzword anymore, but who could live w/out email? =).

the exact feature set remains to be seen, obviously. =) Qt3 offers some new possibilities for database access, data-aware widgets, style/theming, text handling, and more. also, since binary compat is allowed to be broken the opportunity now exists for core components to be extended/improved in ways that were not possible during the 2.x series. how all of this will translate out into actual features will be seen when the coding is actually done.

perhaps for a rough idea: take the things covered in this issue and, realizing that they represent ~2 weeks of developments (and not every single thing that happened either), extrapolate it out over several month's time.

of course, the best way to find out what is happening is to actually jump in and get involved =) of course, future issues of kc kde will strive to keep everyone informed on the various developments as they occur

But, please, don't break the existing, especially about KMail and KNode that work very fine and are used by many people... Even, perhaps, keeping a last KDE 3.0 Kmail and KNode, similar to the 2.2 ones (but in Qt3, of course) would be a good thing while starting the new KMessenger and some little desagreements, I fear...

About the Cookbook story, I see that there is no decision and that the best KDE apps will remind among the less best in the KDE Apps. It's hard for a end user to use some of these KDE Apps. At first few ones are in the distributions, the user has to go on the KDE Apps site. Here there are many apps, some dead, some very new, many with similar purpouse... And then, when he has choosen, he has to compile. And it fails !...

I did it 2 days ago and today, with Kwave and KMyMoney. I have errors in the end of ./configure... So sorry, I use KDE Deskop, I use KOffice, I cannot use the KDE apps.

I feel very sorry that such interesting apps are so hard to be used. I don't know what would be a good solution, but I think it is necessary to find a solution.

(Ah, about KMail-KMessenger, I hope that in the archiv folders, there will be a "Receiver" column (as in OE and Netscape Messenger). I posted this bug wish some months ago, and It is important, I think, when mixing in a same folder sent end received mails...)

> But, please, don't break the existing,
> especially about KMail and KNode that work
> very fine and are used by many people... Even,
> perhaps, keeping a last KDE 3.0 Kmail and
> KNode, similar to the 2.2 ones (but in Qt3, of
> course) would be a good thing while starting
> the new KMessenger and some little
> desagreements, I fear...

Nobody spoke here of making KMail and KNode a single application. The whole issue is only about sharing common code in a library.
At least up to now no GUI changes are involved.

Thanks for sharing with us! Unfortunately, every time I restart KDE, the files in that directory are removed and the file fonts.dir is remade. Do I need to enable some option in order to keep those files?

You can also copy this to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/cursor.pcf.gz, to get White mouse pointer work in X windows along with KDE and for Every user without any need to copy it to ~/.kde/share/fonts/override folder.
(well, I could not mail you kmail just ignores your email address.)

I requested for this feature in KDE 2.0, and Stephen Kulow very bluntly rejected my wishlist, saying this panel(left-side logo) will look ugly like windows.

I am very happy that KDE Team has added this, and hope that they will also add "K Start" a Start button clone with the windows logo changed with KDE's one and keybindings and kicker themes which would emulate Windows Menus like Programs, accessories, etc.,

I agree fully on the k-menu matter, I find it also very bothersome that the k-menu button can't be stretched in width.. It's also quite a limitation in theme-creation.. KDE developers shouldn't confuse options that remove limitations (artistical or functional) with things microsoft just happens to have..

I however would't like to see the exact same buildup of the windows start menu, it just isn't very functional and intuitive to my opinion. For example you should be able to make the size of the icons on the main kpanel bigger (like windows has also adopted). Just two sizes would already to the trick.. They need such a features anyway, for the accesibility features kde is lacking currently. The KPanel should get a place in the kicker Settings with all these things..

The KDE team is currently hoping to release KDE 3.0 around January 2002.
It could get posponed a bit, but I can already tell from what I've seen, that the bidirectionality in the KDE libraries in CVS works quite well. I was able to very easily type in Hebrew from right to left in KWrite and Kate.
For more information on Hebrew in KDE, visit http://www.kde.org/il/hebrew/

as for the arguments passed to ./configure in the kde cvs modules, you may want to add a --prefix= (i use /opt/kde2) to keep it seperate in case something bad happens *knock on wood* (it also makes it easier to do a completley fresh install.. rm -rf /opt/kde2). --enable-final also speeds up compiling quite a bit, though it requires a bit more memory to do so ...

well, there isn't a KC GNOME, but i suppose you are referring to the GNOME Summary. i am trying to figure out what is going on w/LT but it seems that since their little internal shake-up occurred it has taken a bit longer than usual to get KC KDE posted. :/

In not a developer but i feel that people will expect a lot of improvement of KDE3 over KDE2 but i think that the release date is to early to make a lot of things. I think it should be delayed a couple of months.
Another thing, with the QT3 database improvements, wouldn't be easy make kmessenger do vfolders just as evolution does. I like kmail more than evolution but Vfolders rocks